Anti‐Icing Performance of Superhydrophobic Texture Surfaces Depending on Reference Environments

Abstract Materials decorated by the hierarchical micro‐nanostructures similar to lotus leaf surface topographies are firmly considered to possess the substantial anti‐icing functions, showing icing‐delay and low ice adhesion. Here, the aim of this work is to verify the anti‐icing capacity in the actual icing environment containing supercooled airflow. This study, therefore, develops both routes to fabricate the hierarchical micro‐nanostructure and single nanostructure superhydrophobic surfaces, and first evaluates their anti‐icing capacity based on the routine measuring strategies in laboratory. Also, the potential application environment is modeled and used to verify their anti‐icing performance for further guiding rational design of surface structures of anti‐icing materials. Due to the double‐scale effect, the hierarchical micro‐nanostructure can induce more air pockets to produce the higher hydrophobicity and anti‐icing capacity based on the big reference droplets (diameter > 2 mm) and even static water. However, the verified results in the potential application environment demonstrate that the hierarchical micro‐nanostructure exhibits the inferior anti‐icing performance, comparing with the single nanostructure. The icing area on the single nanostructure surface is almost half of that on the hierarchical micro‐nanostructure surface, also causing a reduction of ≈26 g in icing mass.